I absolutely love the video by CommonCraft introducing Social Networking. Before watching it, I understood that the purpose of social networking applications was to connect you with other people, but the video help me tease out the key concept that social networking connects me not only with my friends but with friends of friends–and that the resulting network makes it much easier to find colleagues and forge new connections.

I have been using Facebook since I was at The Claremont Colleges. When I accepted the position here at EKU, I was delighted to see that several folks were already using Facebook, and I used this social networking tool to begin to get to know my future co-workers. I met lotsofreallygreatpeople at ALA who have also become my “friends” on Facebook; ironically, this has really brought home the fact to me how valuable face-to-face connections are to us human beings. I would not have felt it appropriate to seek out these folks and add them as my friends on Facebook until I had spent some time in the same room with them. Though I welcome connections from other like minds who add me before meeting me, there is an added dimension in my relationships (using that word loosely, here!) with the “friends” I have met in real life that is still somehow missing with the few whom I have not yet met.

If you are tired of simply poking people and seeing their interests expressed as blocks of boring text, I suggest that you add a few applications. My favorite are the Harry Potter spells application, iRead and flixter. I also like the Cities I’ve Visited Application and think that the applications that pull content from sites like Twitter and Dopplr are worth taking a look at. YMMV with those.

4 comments to Catching up with Learning 2.0 – Week 2, Social Networking

This whole “friends” thing is still a source of conflict for me. It’s not so much that I feel the need to have had in-person interaction with a person to think of them as part of my social network, but I do feel some sort of interaction/conversation is necessary. A Meebo room chat is comfortable enough for me to feel a connection with its participants. Even an exchange of comments on blogs. Whatever. Just some sort of interchange that begins to develop a rapport.

I had this very discussion with sirexkat when she sent me a Facebook friend request. We’d never interacted, but I knew we were “running in the same circles.” So I messaged her, started the conversation and now I’m satisfied that I could comfortably chat with her anytime.

And now I have three Twitter friend requests from people who I’ve never interacted with, but who I’d probably enjoy interaction with. I wish they would contact me somehow and forge that relationship.

You know, now that you mention it, I do feel a stronger connection to a few folks who have reached out to me via Facebook, Twitter, email, whatever. I am top-heavy on Twitter followers but feel like I’m saturated so I don’t automatically add people who follow me.

Also weird to note is all this new language we’re using. Very strange to say that I have dozens of people “following” me. Just a year ago that would have sounded creepy.

I had some 25 followers, no idea who they are. I recently set my updates to private and lost them all. If I’d realized it would do that, I probably wouldn’t have. Don’t want to seem unfriendly (too late). But was getting a little weirded out by the idea…